If say Google were to create a top haskell web application framework and server, in no time, Haskell would see increased usage.

You see this with top technology like Java, C++ (through Microsoft's early Win32 platforms), .NET, Apple and Cocoa, Android has increased Linux deployments

If they build it, people will come.

...

I would love to see this experiment. Let's pretend Google creates a fork of the darcs project. Now gdarcs is a google project. And maybe they build haskell oriented hooks into the software. I bet you will see increased use for this particular technology and haskell solely because google was involved in a major haskell based application.

I think GWT proved that's not the case. Go and Dart aren't exactly taking the world by storm either.

Greg did give a good explanation for the cases you mention: it's the only way to develop for a specific platform. Apple decides all iOS apps must be programmed in Objective C, so you have a bunch of people learning it. But this hasn't led to GNUStep taking off. Likewise with .NET: Mono hasn't displaced Java in any meaningful way on non-Windows platforms.

GNUStep is also being used. It could be the next desktop framework. But that hasn't happened, and there's no compelling reason to say that it will. Rails had a much more disruptive influence on the industry than GWT did, by far. In other words: the name "Google" certainly helped, but not very much.

Is there something I'm missing about the GWT and Google Chrome connection?

I'm sorry, but i do not think you have a complete picture of what's going on in industry.

For example we did evaluate at one point one of the GWT based frameworks (vaadin). We decided against it. The reason: it ties the server side to java platform, whereas other pure javascript UI libraries (ExtJS, Dojo, YUI etc) allow you to have a server agnostic client. Modularity is the key. And GWT solutions are too heavy, too tightly coupled and at the same time fragile. It's the same thing as with RPC/CORBA vs plain html/REST.

That's the main reason GWT did not (and will not) take the web programming by storm. it's simply a misguided idea that looks cool on the surface.

I have a hard time understanding where you are going with this. No one is debating this obvious fact. It is a common knowledge that big corporations push their own web frameworks. 2 of the most widely used ones are ASP from Microsoft and JSP from Sun/Oracle. Also remember ColdFusion ? Where is it now ?

What exactly does it prove, or how it invalidates anything OP says in his article ?

I argue that company investment in a particular framework and company investment in a particular language can drive language adoption at a much faster rate. Company investment in framework and language can contribute to a software technologies.

You have given a couple of example to disprove my theory. But there are so many examples that prove my theory.

...

Pick your favorite company, if they were to invest in haskell or even take over parts of the language changes are just associating with haskell libraries, I guarantee the rate of adoption of that software will increase ten fold.

...
I don't necessarily like it. But companies still tend to drive technology. It could be Haskell technology or Scala or HTML5 frameworks. The idea that you can just get a couple of open source hackers in a room and hope that their tech takes off, just didn't happen.

Plus, why is this a bad thing? It is a good. What is wrong with say Google, taking a strong in Haskell? And advertising that they do?

I do not see author twisting arms of commercial companies and forcing them NOT to create or support a haskell web framework.

On the other hand, successful open source projects DO get commercial backing (Linux, MySql, ROR, PHP). So yes, couple of open source hackers make things happen all the time.

The idea that you can somehow rally commercial support just by asking for it is wrong. No one is going to waste their money on you. You have to make those companies notice your success, and want to be part of it, want to profit from it. And open source framework is the right start.